Lennon first ponders life beyond the Beatles

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John admits he first contemplated life beyond The Beatles while on set without his bandmates in 1966 on film location.

“Of course, I was a Beatle, but things had begun to change. In 1966, just before we met, I went to Almeria, Spain, to make the movie ‘How I Won the War.’

“It did me a lot of good to get away. I was there six weeks. I wrote Strawberry Fields Forever there, by the way. It gave me time to think on my own, away from the others.

“From then on, I was looking for somewhere to go, but I didn’t have the nerve to really step out on the boat by myself and push it off.

“I just didn’t have the guts to do it, you see. Because I didn’t know where to go.

“The Beatles had stopped touring and I didn’t know what to do. Instead of going home and being with the family, I immediately went to Spain with Dick Lester because I couldn’t deal with not being continually onstage.

“That was the first time I thought, ‘My God, what do you do if this isn’t going on? What is there? There’s no life without it.’ And that’s when the seed was planted that I had to somehow get out of this, without being thrown out by the others. But I could never step out of the palace because it was too frightening.

I was really too scared to walk away. I was thinking, ‘Well, this is the end, really. There’s no more touring. That means there’s going to be a blank space in the future.’ At some time or other that’s when I started considering life without The Beatles – what would it be? And I spent that six weeks thinking about that: ‘What am I going to do? Am I going to be doing Vegas? But cabaret?’ I mean, where do you go? So that’s when I started thinking about it.

But I could not think what it would be, or how I could do it. I didn’t even consider forming my own group or anything, because it didn’t enter my mind. Just what would I do when it stopped?

“When I fell in love with Yoko, I knew, My God, this is different from anything I’ve ever known. This is something other. This is more than a hit record, more than gold, more than everything. It is indescribable.”

Read the full blog: The Beatle, The Bankie & The Bouquet .

Photo montage of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jimmy Reid and in front of the Titan crane in the former shipyards of Clydebank

The full story behind John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s donation to Clyde shipbuilders of the UCS in 1971 as he went from Beatle to political and peace activist.

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